Peter Oborne is the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator.

A note to the strange John Rentoul: I am not a conspiracy theorist

There are a lot of strange people out there on the internet who make weird or unfounded claims, and almost invariably the wisest course is to leave them alone.

One of these characters is John Rentoul, a columnist on the Independent. Mr Rentoul has an obsession with what I write. This manifests itself in a number of ways, including the repeated claim that I am a "conspiracy theorist" and "part of a hurtful and tasteless campaign to suggest that David Kelly was murdered".

These claims are so absurd that I have long thought it best to ignore them. However, several months ago I chanced to share a short underground train journey with Mr Rentoul, and took the opportunity to gently suggest that it was high time he stopped making the false allegation that I believed David Kelly had been murdered.

A period of silence followed. But at last we have this article. It amounts at best to a very grudging correction, and is limited to a footnote. Nevertheless one must be grateful for small mercies.

In fact, Lord Hutton failed even in his most basic of tasks, which was to fulfil his remit to examine 'the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly'. Only a tiny proportion of his 700-page report was devoted to examining the weapons expert's cause of death – and even these can be shown at best to be complacent and sloppily researched, and the conclusions questionable.

And:

Dr Kelly may, of course, have died in the way Lord Hutton suggested – but it was deeply unprofessional of him simply to brush aside so many suspicious factors that might have led to a different conclusion.

Mr Rentoul (or his friend David Aaronovitch who has accused me of being a conspiracy theorist in the current edition of the Spectator) have always been welcome to challenge what I actually wrote about the professionalism of the Hutton Inquiry. Instead they have repeatedly chosen to misrepresent what I wrote. I am glad that Mr Rentoul at least is slowly beginning to see the light of day.